Developing an Inclusive Learning Environment through Discourse: Using Mixed-Reality Simulations to Prepare Pre-Service Teachers to Pose Purposeful Questions
Location
PARB 239 (Second Floor)
Proposal Track
Research Project
Session Format
Presentation
Abstract
Ensuring success for all students includes providing an equitable and inclusive learning environment. Posing purposeful questions during a lesson creates a discourse-rich classroom environment that promotes equity and inclusion, challenges spaces of marginality (Aguirre et al., 2013), and enables students to know their ideas matter. Students’ view themselves as knowers, thinkers, and doers when they have opportunities to share their thinking during classroom discussion (NCTM, 2015), which increases their confidence and agency to ask questions and develop their own ideas (Boaler & Staples, 2008). However, posing purposeful questioning is often a difficult teaching skill for pre-service teachers (PSTs) to acquire because it requires experience, careful listening, and quick thinking to advance students’ understandings (Herbel-Eisenmann & Breyfogle, 2005). Pre-service teacher preparation can facilitate the process of learning to create a discourse-rich inclusive classroom environment grounded in posing purposeful questions that support student learning. In this phenomenological study, mixed-reality (MR) simulations were used to prepare PSTs to pose purposeful questions during lesson facilitation rehearsal with MR avatar-students. The session will share the ways PSTs experienced rehearsing the facilitation of posing purposeful questions via MR simulations, and include a few examples of PSTs’ teaching episodes for discussion of successes, challenges, and lessons learned.
Keywords
Pre-Service Teachers, Mixed-Reality Simulation, Discourse, Questioning, Equity, Inclusion
Professional Bio
Belinda P. Edwards, Ph.D. is a Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Secondary and Middle Grades Education at Kennesaw State University. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on Equity and Inclusion in Methods for Pre-Service Teachers and Clinical Practice & Partnerships with specific focus on preparing pre-service teachers in a practice-based learning environment. She has served as a Co-PI on an $895,000 NSF Noyce grant focused on developing culturally responsive mathematics teachers, and numerous Teacher Quality (TQ) grants where funds were used to facilitate PD designed to assist practicing teachers in designing culturally relevant and social justice lessons, and more recently she is PI on an internal grant focused on the use of mixed-reality simulations enabling pre-service teachers to rehearse/practice facilitating pedagogical methods that support student learning. She has experience planning and facilitating professional learning for practicing and induction STEM teachers.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Edwards, Belinda, "Developing an Inclusive Learning Environment through Discourse: Using Mixed-Reality Simulations to Prepare Pre-Service Teachers to Pose Purposeful Questions" (2022). Georgia Educational Research Association Conference. 29.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gera/2022/2022/29
Developing an Inclusive Learning Environment through Discourse: Using Mixed-Reality Simulations to Prepare Pre-Service Teachers to Pose Purposeful Questions
PARB 239 (Second Floor)
Ensuring success for all students includes providing an equitable and inclusive learning environment. Posing purposeful questions during a lesson creates a discourse-rich classroom environment that promotes equity and inclusion, challenges spaces of marginality (Aguirre et al., 2013), and enables students to know their ideas matter. Students’ view themselves as knowers, thinkers, and doers when they have opportunities to share their thinking during classroom discussion (NCTM, 2015), which increases their confidence and agency to ask questions and develop their own ideas (Boaler & Staples, 2008). However, posing purposeful questioning is often a difficult teaching skill for pre-service teachers (PSTs) to acquire because it requires experience, careful listening, and quick thinking to advance students’ understandings (Herbel-Eisenmann & Breyfogle, 2005). Pre-service teacher preparation can facilitate the process of learning to create a discourse-rich inclusive classroom environment grounded in posing purposeful questions that support student learning. In this phenomenological study, mixed-reality (MR) simulations were used to prepare PSTs to pose purposeful questions during lesson facilitation rehearsal with MR avatar-students. The session will share the ways PSTs experienced rehearsing the facilitation of posing purposeful questions via MR simulations, and include a few examples of PSTs’ teaching episodes for discussion of successes, challenges, and lessons learned.
